electronic brain surgery since 2001

Digitizing my Beer Can Collection

Saturday November 11th, 1989 my parents took me for the very first visit in what was known back then as West Berlin. The Berlin Wall had come “down” rather suddenly just three days ago and this was the first weekend after that historical event. Streets were full of celebrating people… and litter.

To eleven year old me all of this was very fascinating of course. And one particular piece of the litter caught my eye: beer cans. In the GDR, aluminum cans for drinks did not exist. Aluminium was a too precious metal to waste on something so mundane…

The first can I picked up was only meant as a souvenir to remember the day, but somehow I continued to collect more. Throughout the nineties I collected about 370 cans, even though I did not drink beer for most of this time myself. My parents were happy to help out a bit

Here is an old picture from my room in 1993:

However at some point, I was more interested in drinking beer than in collecting empty cans, so the cans moved into boxes and those boxes moved into the cellar. But I could never bring it over myself to get rid of them. For years I fantasized about digitizing them by building a special beer can scanner. But I never found the time (and skill) to build it.

Photo Studio Setup

This week I decided to finally do it in another way. Instead of scanning them, I would take pictures from multiple sides. Doing something with those pictures could come later.

The RPi controls the stepper which has a simple 3D printed platform attached to rotate the can in 8 steps and take a picture for each side. A simple push button lets me signal that the next can is ready.